Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
William Carlos Williams was a rare poet who found fame and lived long enough to enjoy it, and yet, Jeffrey Careyva notes, "few learn about the series of strokes that knocked Williams down again and again during the height of his fame after World War II."
Read more about it in Careyva's post for the Indiana University Press blog, "This Old Goose Still Honks: Dysfluency in William Carlos Williams's Late Poetry."
The author's JML 48.2 essay on Williams is available FREE, linked in the post!
EDITED BY JAMES BROPHY AND WILLIAM DAVIES
Cambridge UP, 2022
ISBN: 9781009222549
Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.
The editors and a distinguished team of contributors have produced a superb collection that leaves no poetic allusion unanalyzed. This book will be a classic of Beckett criticism. Here is scholarship taken to a high degree, adding contexts and glosses to Sean Lawlor’s and John Pilling’s pionneering work. Everyone interested in Beckett will need to read this engrossing book on the poetry and rediscover Beckett the poet. —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
James Brophy is a lecturer in modern languages & classics, and preceptor in the Honors College of the University of Maine. His scholarship focuses on modern British and Irish literature, poetics, and classical reception studies. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Translation Studies, Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, among other venues.
William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading. His work on Samuel Beckett includes the monograph Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020) and the edited volume Beckett and Politics (2021, with Helen Bailey). He was a contributor to the BBC Radio 4 documentary "Beckett's Last Tapes" (2019).
BY EVA LILJA
Bloomsbury Academic, 2023
ISBN: 9798765100967
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rhythm-in-modern-poetry-9798765100967/
A pioneering work in cognitive versification studies, scrutinizing the rhythmical means of free verse.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Investigating a previously neglected area of study, Rhythm in Modern Poetry establishes a foundation for cognitive versification studies with a focus on the modernist free verse. Following in the tradition of cognitive poetics by Reuven Tsur, Richard Cureton and Derek Attridge, every chapter investigates the rhythms of one modern poem, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Plath and others, and engages each element in the broader interpretation of the poem in question.
In her examination of modernist poetry in English and other Germanic languages, Eva Lilja expands her analysis to discuss both the Ancient Greek and Norse origins of rhythm in free verse and the intermedia intersection, comparing poetic rhythm with rhythm in pictures, sculptures and dance. Rhythm in Modern Poetry thus expands the field of cognitive versification studies while also engaging readers writ large interested in how rhythm works in the aesthetic field.
"This is a landmark book. It sets out with clarity and commitment how an approach based in poetic cognition can illuminate poetry, metrics, rhythm, and reading, Rhythms in Modern Poetry take sthe reader on an intellectual and poetic journey in its compelling ideas and its artful expression" --Peter Stockwell, professor of literary linguistics, University of Nottingham
"Eva Lilja's new book is not only for the scholars and students of cognitive versification, but for anyone who is keen to gain deeper insight into the poetics of free verse. Through a meticulous analysis of historical context and diverse art forms, the book unveils the underlying cognitive processes that shape modern poetry and shows the reader new ways to uncover the rich and subtle meanings of poetic rhythm." --Maria-Kristina Lotman, associate professor in classical studies, University of Tartu, Estonia
Eva Lilja is professor emerita of literature, specializing in modernist poetry, in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She pioneered the study of free versification since her doctoral thesis in 1981 and was the founder and chair for the Nordic Society for Metrical Studies (1995-2009). Lilja was also a Swedish Academy Researcher for writing the official Swedish handbook in metrics (1998-2006).
BY SEAN MARK
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
ISBN: 978-3-030-91947-4
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91948-1
In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century?
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.
“Sean Mark’s Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis expounds incisively on Pasolini’s interview of Pound in 1967 to align two poets from opposite political camps, thus exposing the complex tension between poetry and ideology in both authors’ work. Mark’s acute and sophisticated readings result in a significant revision to our understanding of Pound’s and Pasolini’s respective poetics and places in contemporary culture. This is a distinguished and important book.”
—Alessia Ricciardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University
“As Sean Mark’s magistral comparative study brings together the antithetical poles of 20th-century poetry, it illuminates both corpuses: the later Pound turns into a Pasolini character, and the poetic myth he provided allows Pasolini to reshape his religious communism. Pound and Pasolini kept their faith in human creativity and redemption and thus remain true ‘educators,’ their dialogue a source of inspiration in times of crisis.”
—Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania
“Sean Mark’s fascinating study of Pound and Pasolini ranges from their actual contacts – most notably Pasolini’s 1967 interview with Pound – to detailed consideration of their contrasting aesthetic and political approaches, culminating in unexpected parallels in the methodology of the fragmentary and late work in The Cantos and Petrolio. Mark adds new dimensions to our understanding of both the Italian Pound and the American Pasolini, and sets an example of how contemporary comparative scholarship can work.”
—David Ayers, Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory, University of Kent
Sean Mark is associate professor in literature and translation at Université Catholique de Lille, France.
BY DANIEL T. O'HARA
Temple University
Edward Allen. Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 281 pp. $99.99 hardcover.
Any reader wanting to trace the parallels between modern American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and the emergence of new media technology —telephone, radio, phonograph, and sound (musical) film documentary (such as Black Magic: A Pictorial History of The African-American in the Performing Arts [1967] and Black Nativity: Gospel on Broadway [1962])— will find Edward Allen’s Modernist Invention useful, informative, and fluent in communication and critical analysis as well as in theories of literary and cultural import. A good example is the reading of Wallace Stevens’s late poem “The Sick Man” (1950; pp.126-130). Allen parallels each poet he samples to an emergent media technology; Stevens’s media muse is the radio.
After establishing the general media climate or ecology at the time, here via a rehearsal of Stevens’s correspondence with his friends the Churches—especially the widow Barbara Church, in which the poet’s reluctant but finally full-throated love affair with the radio becomes clear— Allen reads the selected example in this specific media context. At first glance, “The Sick Man” does not automatically register as a sick man’s experience of tuning and listening to his radio during the middle of the night. Instead, the poem, as Allen cites it, does make the visible a little harder literally to see, if more imaginatively suggestive for meditation:
Allen fills in the most likely context as being the old ill poet listening to and tuning his radio, and first hearing drifting along the air waves bands of black men playing their harmonicas and guitars, and then men—as if being white is the full human state—sounding their wordless chorals dissolving in the air. These massive constitutive American opposite symbols form, for the sick man, “the unison of the music” he creatively imagines and eloquently articulates:
The words of winter in which these two will come together, In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies, The listener, listening in the shadows, seeing them, Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him. Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail, The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken. (Stevens qtd. in 129)
Allen resourcefully illuminates these late allusions to Stevens’s own earlier poems, themes, figures, favorite tropes—including the figure of the listener, the winter climate, the well-tuned guitar-accompanied words. Even as we see the new addition, the explicitly self-hailing practice of poetic composition that Stevens joins—and would fully exemplify as he eventually faces the ultimate quiet coming ever closer. Like his poetic father, Walt Whitman, Stevens conceives all his poems as songs of the self, ever courting and yet holding off, the final dark embrace. The only vision of unison held open yet together, at the end.
With Frost, Allen reads the long narrative dialogue “Snow” from Mountain Interval (1917). Frost stages strategically the use of the telephone, in which a couple listening to their party line discloses what they do not see, another couple’s poignant domestic crisis that Frost reveals wryly for the observant reader via this new media device . Similarly, Allen traces Marianne Moore’s engagements with recording her poetry, especially in connection with Caedmon Records after WWII. But it is the last chapter, on Langston Hughes and how his early and continuing study of cinematic techniques, especially montage, leads him not only to develop documentaries of Black musicals but also to expand the limits of lyric poetry, including his own most celebrated lyric, as in the epic late poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).
Modernist Invention is most successful in integrating its media technology and American poetry halves in an inventive way every bit worthy of the title adjective modernist in this final chapter on Hughes. While entertaining the established critiques of this late experiment Montage of a Dream Deferred—its repetitive nature, its often-lame colloquial expressions, its epic ambitions overshooting the poet’s own lyrical moments of creativity—Allen instead demonstrates this poem’s self-conscious, even self-parodic intentionality, startling its creator by sudden imaginative surprises in the course of pursuing a jazz improvisational method. Allen devotes nine pages to its analysis, which is why I will conclude with an example from the end of the Hughes chapter. The brief obscure lyric “Advice to Cullud Movie Actors” ends the chapter, as its self-parodic depiction of tinsel-town Black actors’ required method of dramatic portrayal:
Allen masterfully concludes: “It’s an unforgiving poem, but one that should leave us in no doubt that Goldwyn’s industry had got well and truly under the poet’s skin” (248). This conclusion is fitting all around.
Framing the book’s analyses is a long Introduction (pp.1-36) and a half the size Coda (pp. 249-261 entitled “Synchronicity.” Allen launches his book under the flagship 1987 paper by Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” The established account of modernism in Anglo-American literary history is punctuated by sacred dates, none more important than the miraculous year 1922, when Ulysses and The Waste Land were published in book form. Modernism tends in this perspective to be represented as a post-WWI development, or better, reaction. The literary innovations of modernism are seen thereby as rather simply reactions to the catastrophe of war and its aftermath.
Williams’s point, however, is to underscore how modernism is first of all broader than any one or two national bases and also a historical happening with many different moments. In fact, as Williams suggests, modernism was a historical socio-political emergence or series of emergences not limited in time or place, except in the broadest possible terms, and not only associated with literature and the other arts, but widespread in popular forms as well as transnational, global in its impact, and associated with objects and practices we have only begun to plumb (in 1987).
Allen’s book plows in this field. But unlike the developmental logic of established cultural histories, it would bring together in synchronous fashion the art-forms, elite and popular, American and international, attached less to these elite forms and more to the popular practices and techniques, which blossom as new inventions to shape and reshape the modernist world, moment by moment. Such emergences of this universal modernist event form the ambitious horizon still beckoning, as we leave Allen’s view of Hughes in the throes of his quick-cut montages, thereby suggesting the equally fine books to come.
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Daniel T. O’Hara, emeritus professor of English and humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and The Modern Sublime: Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), and editor or co-editor of six collections, most recently Humanistic Criticism: A William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern UP, 2015).
BY CALISTA MCRAE
Cornell University Press, October 2020
Hardback ISBN: 9781501750977
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750977/lyric-as-comedy/#bookTabs=1
A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging.
The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.
"This is an immensely pleasurable book to read. McRae is a beautiful reader of poetry, and her attention to form and her serious thinking through of her material is evident on every page. I cannot overstate the quality of McRae's subtle way of reading."
--Gillian White, University of Michigan, author of Lyric Shame
"Calista McRae wittily and incisively examines how the inwardness and embarrassment of mid-century lyric resembles the abjection of stand-up comedy. A tightly-argued, beautifully written book, Lyric as Comedy reveals the complexity and slipperiness of the speaking 'I' on the page or the stage. McRae shows how pervasive and important comic technique is, even in apparently quite serious poems."
--Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University, editor of Humor in Modern American Poetry
Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
